Articles

This paper introduces the concept of the interpassive spectator into the field of sports philosophy. It examines the phenomenon of "canned spectators" – pre-recorded audience sounds edited to respond to live, televised sports – which emerged following the stringent health measures that forced elite sporting events to be held behind closed doors. Drawing on the cultural theories of Robert Pfaller and Slavoj Žižek, the author contrasts the logic of interpassivity with that of interactivity. While interactive works require the active participation of an audience to be complete, interpassive works allow an external medium to perform the act of "enjoyment" or "attention" on behalf of the observer. Using examples from elite football in Germany and England, the paper describes how broadcasters utilised sound technology derived from computer games to simulate a "warmly familiar ambience" during matches in the Bundesliga and Premier League. The paper rejects both purely critical and purely affirmative interpretations of this technology. Instead, it argues that the primary "danger" of canned spectators is not that they render the viewer passive, but that they deprive the viewer of their ability to passively enjoy. By allowing the television to "enjoy" for them, the spectator is potentially alienated from their own embodied memory, becoming prepared instead for a form of mindless, frenetic activity.

In his influential study Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson makes the claim that a novel conception of time is inaugurated by the introduction of nations: in contrast to the agrarian sense of time as cyclical and characterised by recurrence, the time of the nation is linear, homogeneous and empty. This notion of temporality is drawn from an earlier work by Walter Benjamin, who posits the linearity of traditional historiography with what he refers to as Messianic time, which is to be understood as a temporality where the moment of redemption is an ever-present potentiality. This essay sets out to delineate these three notions of time, and then goes on to discuss this third temporality in greater detail. First, it can be considered as a psychological time, or a mind time, governed by traumatic encounters. This sense is shown as a strictly logical time in the work of Jacques Lacan. Second, it is a time of grace, in the sense that it is governed by necessity. Blaise Pascal and the Jansenists went to great lengths to refute the dominant notion of grace as sufficient. If there is an instance that determines events, then the means by which this instance governs can only be a necessary cause. Finally, the work of Benedict Anderson, and particularly a later article in his corpus, is reconsidered. Here, Anderson argues that the effects of globalisation have to some extent rendered the temporal linearity of nationalism obsolete. It is therefore apt to consider what a time after nationalism will be like.

This essay presents two models of sports research, one characterised by a didactic and normative relation to its object, while wedded to a view of language characterised by a transparent and non-mediated relation between signifier and signified, and another result of the linguistic turn and an interest in reception studies and audiences. The latter has failed to deliver on its promise to democratise sports studies, as it has become centrally engaged in mapping audiences as consumers. Through a narrative analysis of three stories by Kafka, the essay shows how these models can be seen as employing specific narrative forms, and how Kafka's last instalment in The Hunger Artist sequel offered a different perspective of the relation between art and society. This latter form of narrative may take sports studies beyond the hold of what psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan referred to as the specular phase of subject formation and into an imaginary servitude characteristic of the social "I," formed in the closing phase of the Mirror Stage.

This essay discusses how spectacular sports are framed in a national, epic world of fathers, firsts and bests, and put to use in regulating desire by narrating the fundamental fantasies that hold the subject together. Spectacular sports provide allegories of the excessive body, and these embodied narratives are meticulously produced through an individualising training machine designed to deliver moments of excess. Sports produce phantasms of peak moments and phallic dominance, and symbolise a conquest of youth, women and the working population. We ask if the subject may experience a kind of subjective destitution by the loss of a fundamental fantasy from watching sports and what the effects of such an experience may be. Can televised football induce in the viewer a sense that these images are mistaken as objects of desire, and give rise to the truth effects of "full speech"?